But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength.
They will soar high on wings like eagles.
They will run and not grow weary.
They will walk and not faint.

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About SouthernGirl2

A Native Texan who adores baby kittens, loves horses, rodeos, pomegranates, & collect Eagles.
Enjoys politics, games shows, & dancing to all types of music. Loves discussing and learning about different cultures.
A Phi Theta Kappa lifetime member with a passion for Social & Civil Justice.

The CNN anchor misses the point when he says sagging pants are stopping young Black men from getting jobs. It’s racial, social, and class inequality that’s stopping them.
By Keith Boykin
Posted: 07/28/2013 05:47 PM EDT

One of the hardest things for me about writing on controversial topics is the possibility of alienating my own friends and colleagues.

Last week I wrote a piece, Why White People Don’t See Racism, that raised a few objections from a couple of my white friends. And last year I wrote a piece about my friend and colleague Roland Martin and his Super Bowl tweets that got me blocked from his Twitter feed, even though I still respect and admire him.

With that history in mind, however, I certainly don’t want my words today to alienate my friend Don Lemon, so I should start by saying that I really, really like Don Lemon.

Don was the very first person I followed when I signed up on Twitter. I’ve known him for years and I was a fan even before I did. In some ways he’s been a hero, and I praised him when he became the first national Black TV news anchor to come out of the closet in 2011.

That’s why I was so troubled when I turned on the TV Saturday and saw Lemon complaining about young Black men wearing sagging jeans. Echoing recent words from Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, Lemon said the controversial right-wing talk show host “doesn’t go far enough” in his critique of Black culture.

…………………………………

I learned something valuable from those experiences. Although I had moved to the community to become part of the exciting “new Harlem” I had heard about, in reality I was still an outsider to a lot of the people who’d grown up and spent their lives there.

Over the past few months, I’ve seen Don Lemon in Harlem quite a few times. He’s always friendly and always says hello, even when I don’t recognize him in his street clothes. And although I understand his frustration with some things in our community, I fundamentally disagree with the views he expressed this weekend.

You see, as a relatively privileged well-educated Black man of a certain age, I have to agree with Lemon that sagging pants and littering teens bothers me. Nor do I like to hear the N-word every time I walk to the corner store. That was not my life experience as a product of the suburbs. But I also know these community issues are not the main problem facing young Black kids today.

Sagging pants and littering neighbors aren’t stopping young Black men from getting jobs. It’s racial, social, and class inequality that’s stopping them. It’s the lack of educational and economic opportunities available to them. It’s the disproportionate incarceration of young black men and the 700,000 stop-and-frisks on New York City streets. Unfortunately, what Lemon’s analysis does is to confuse cause and effect. That’s because it’s a lot easier to focus on the effects – the street issues – than to deal with the cause – entrenched systemic and institutional barriers that restrict opportunities for African-Americans.

In a country where white unemployment has never reached 10 percent since the Great Depression but Black unemployment has only rarely dipped below 10 percent since records have been kept, our problems are not sartorial but structural. In fact, if white unemployment remained at the level it has for Blacks over the past 40 years, we’d launch a new “New Deal” program to get people back to work. We’d invest in job training and education and encourage home ownership, just as the nation did with the GI bill after World War II. But that’s not happening.

How Therapists Drive Away Minority Clients
Many therapists unknowingly perpetuate racism against their own clients.
Published on June 30, 2013 by Monnica T. Williams, Ph.D. in Culturally Speaking

Racial discrimination is pervasive, and minorities regularly experience it in blatant ways (e.g., old fashioned racism) and subtle ways (e.g., microaggressions). In the US, African Americans experience the most discrimination, followed by Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans (Chao et al., 2012), although discrimination against other groups, such as women and sexual minorities is common as well.

The therapeutic relationship is unfortunately not immune to this problem, despite the best intentions of therapists who think they would never act in a racist manner. One example of this can be seen in the experience of race-based trauma, as many White therapists are dismissive of the impact of racism on their minority clients. Having never been subjected to the minority experience, it may not have occurred to them that racism could be traumatic.These are typically therapists who ascribe to a colorblind approach as their method of choice for working with people who are culturally different. However, colorblind ideology is actually a form of racism (Terwilliger et al., 2013), as it provides an excuse for therapists to remain ignorant of the cultures and customs of their non-White fellow human beings.

Racist remarks by therapists

Even among therapists who have received multicultural training, racism often inserts itself unwittingly into the counseling process. Here are a few examples of actual statements made by therapists to African American clients. I explain why a person of color might find each of these remarks offensive.

The Charitable-Industrial Complex
By PETER BUFFETT
Published: July 26, 2013

I HAD spent much of my life writing music for commercials, film and television and knew little about the world of philanthropy as practiced by the very wealthy until what I call the big bang happened in 2006. That year, my father, Warren Buffett, made good on his commitment to give nearly all of his accumulated wealth back to society. In addition to making several large donations, he added generously to the three foundations that my parents had created years earlier, one for each of their children to run

Early on in our philanthropic journey, my wife and I became aware of something I started to call Philanthropic Colonialism. I noticed that a donor had the urge to “save the day” in some fashion. People (including me) who had very little knowledge of a particular place would think that they could solve a local problem. Whether it involved farming methods, education practices, job training or business development, over and over I would hear people discuss transplanting what worked in one setting directly into another with little regard for culture, geography or societal norms.

…………………………………….

Because of who my father is, I’ve been able to occupy some seats I never expected to sit in. Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left. There are plenty of statistics that tell us that inequality is continually rising. At the same time, according to the Urban Institute, the nonprofit sector has been steadily growing. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of nonprofits increased 25 percent. Their growth rate now exceeds that of both the business and government sectors. It’s a massive business, with approximately $316 billion given away in 2012 in the United States alone and more than 9.4 million employed.

Philanthropy has become the “it” vehicle to level the playing field and has generated a growing number of gatherings, workshops and affinity groups.

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

Black parents shocked when son was born white
May 17, 2011 | Daily Mail, BBC,

A black couple told this week of their shock and mystification when their son was born with white skin and blond hair.

Francis Tshibangu admitted: ‘My first thought was “Wow, is he really mine?”.’

Congo-born Francis and his wife Arlette already have a two-year-old boy, Seth, whose features reflect his African parentage.

It is thought that baby Daniel, now 11 weeks old, has a slight genetic mutation.

He is not an albino, Britain’s Daily Mail reports.

Tshibangu, 28, said his ‘jaw dropped open’ when Daniel arrived at the UK’s Leicester Royal Infirmary.

“I have been with my wife for three years and there was never a question of infidelity, but seeing his white skin was a surprise to say the least.

“When I bent down and kissed him I got a better look at his features and could see he looked just like me and Arlette. He has my nose and my wife’s lips.”

His 25-year-old wife said: “The reaction in the operating theatre was one of shocked silence, myself included.

“But as the nurse put his little pink body in my arms I bonded with him instantly. When I looked at him all I felt was love. Like any mum who has just given birth, my main concern was that he was healthy, which he is.”

Mr Tshibangu said: “I know there will be some who say my wife has had an affair but I trust her completely and know that isn’t the case. Even if she’d had an affair with a white man, you would expect a mixed-race baby with black hair, not a white baby with soft blond hair like little Daniel”.

He added: “You can see people looking at us thinking, ‘What are that black couple doing with that white baby?’ I am sure there are a few people who think we have stolen him.

“But to us, his skin colour isn’t important. All we can say is that Daniel is our miracle and, though we are shocked by his white skin, we feel very blessed. He’s beautiful.”

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve become tired of the tactic that turns conversations about racism in America into a referendum on Black Culture as a whole, and how “we” need to “fix” that culture. As if fixing that culture all by itself is going to change anything at all?

So how to consider CNN host Don Lemon’s comments over the past few days? When he’s co-signing a cynical effort by Bill O’Reilly to shift the conversation about racial justice in America into another referendum about the failings of Black culture, how am I supposed to regard those comments? Here’s one of his tweets from this afternoon:

I’ve been hearing modified versions of this speech since middle school. In fact, I went to an alternative special education school that, if for nothing else, cultivated much of my social awareness—I mean, we’re talking about field trips to see movies like “Malcolm X” and “Get on the Bus”, and watching the last episode of The Cosby Show as a homework assignment. It was at this school I learned not only about government, but about Paul Robeson.

And even so, I was surrounded by classmates who cursed, listened to Bone Thugs and Harmony, Biggie, Tupac, and go-go bands, and wanted to play basketball every day at gym. I’m not sure everyone in that school made it out okay, but they and the experience I had there gave me something: an awareness of what our culture is. And it is nothing if not diverse in nature.

So now, 20 years later, in the wake of continued injustices against Black people, we have folks like Don Lemon saying that it’s not a matter of the injustices, but a matter of self-confidence, and that all we need to do to fix the former is fix the negatives of Black culture.

Or, in less complicated words: Be More Respectable Negroes.

Listen…

Last I checked, we have a man serving as president; who is Ivy League-educated, did social work in his community, got involved in local politics, married and is raising his two daughters. That man is the embodiment of what so many want our culture to aspire to…

…and he still gets treated like crap. He’s had to show his birth certificate, to a bunch of people who don’t believe him anyway. He’s had to endure disrespect at the hands of so many elected officials—congressmen, senators, governors, and journalists; not to mention the chaff of the populace—and had to do so without falling into the “angry” stereotype that some want him so badly to fulfill.

In other words: Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States does all that Don Lemon requires: dresses nicely, uses appropriate language, keeps his surroundings clean, went to college and law school, and is a responsible and involved parent.

And he’s still called a “nigger”, “mulatto”, compared to a monkey, not given the basic respect afforded other presidents who have served in that capacity; having to have shown proof that he was who he said he was over and over again.

If Mr. Lemon or anyone else thinks that merely changing Black culture is going to change the perception that the folks disrespecting this president have of Black people, they are lying to themselves and to everyone they talk to.

Crime is committed by every race. The biggest crimes are committed on wall street and they brought this country to it’s knees. How were they punished? To this date I have not seen one wall street banker or CEO convicted and locked up by anyone. What percentage of them were black? They have done more damage to this country and to the peoples lively hood than any penny pushing black man in the hood could ever do. This is not just a black problem and to believe so would be stupid and naive. People say control your community and control this and that. I thought this is America ?? United we stand and that blacks have reached equality in this country? Isn’t that why the supreme court voted to remove affirmative action and strip the voter rights act? Show me one stat that proves blacks have reached equality from one reputable source? Prove me wrong! I dare you. They are basically saying to the so called black community while using the media as a bully pulpit ” Hey you people over there; control the other Negros”, Because we have no intention as a nation to help solve the problems in your neighborhoods in any form, other than just locking you all up as animals. We wont help educate, we won’t wont help rehabilitate and we wont do anything to assist. We are going to cut all your so called social programs. Again just another obvious sign of how segregated this country still is and how they have no intention of treating or working with minorities as a people and never have. America is built on propaganda and no place on earth is better at it, because we say so!! Even when real stats prove it to be ranked by economist as #13. As they say in Alcohol Rehab the first step to recover is to admit you have a problem. Not cast the blame on the liquor. Don Lemon is just another uppity negro who has no idea what the hell he’s talking about. Don You don’t live in the hood, nor do you do real work in the hood. Reality is giving your financial status and notoriety you’ll probably never live in the all black community. Just because you are black, doesn’t make you a representative of the black people in the hood. You have no authority to speak about things you don’t experience from day to day. You look like a clown siding with a man who insults you and your people on a weekly basis. Whatever it is you thought you were doing, don’t. You should stick to just reporting the news, because you suck at making it. I’d listen to a white man living in the hood everyday, before I’d ever listen to you and your opinions., His assessment is probably a lot more accurate and sincere than you could ever be. Yes, you may know what it’s like to be a black man in America your skin color and status does not give you immunity to racism. But you have no clue of whats wrong with the black community nor have any real answers to it’s problems other than criticism, so you are better off not saying a word.

Greg Sargent finds Marco Rubio trying to redefine the nature of budget blackmail, declaring that it’s not about Republicans threatening to shut down the government unless Obama defunds heath reform; it’s about Obama threatening to shut down the government unless he gets to implement the law. No, really. Rubio:

I think the real question is: Is Barack Obama willing to shut down the government over ObamaCare? In essence, I think we should pay our military. I think we should fund the government. I just don’t think we should fund ObamaCare. And what the President is saying is we either fund ObamaCare or we don’t fund anything. And I think that’s an unreasonable position. And that’s the position he’s taken and the Democrats have taken.

So, where have I heard that before? In Lincoln’s Cooper Union address, in which he talks of slave interests declaring that they will break up the Union if Northerners vote in a Republican, which will make secession the fault of … anti-slavery forces:

That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, “Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!”

Old Abe would have recognized today’s Republicans — and would probably have been saddened that this modern equivalent of the people he fought against bear the name, though none of the spirit, of his party.

A growing number of Republicans are publicly distancing themselves from Rep. Steve King’s (R-IA) claim that many undocumented youths are drug mules with cantaloupe-sized calves, but the conservative congressman claims that GOP lawmakers are backing him in private.

During an appearance on Fox News on Saturday, King said that Republicans are in fact standing by him, but are afraid to publicly support him for fear of sparking outrage and losing their legislative leverage.

“My colleagues are standing by me. They come up to me constantly and talk to me and say, you’re right, I know you’re right,” King said. “Is the description such that they have to go out to the press and do a press conference or can they come and tell me, I know you’re right, I support you? They can do that privately,” he said:

KING: You know, they have a lot at stake here. There is a leverage within the House of Representatives and they all need to be concerned about their own leverage, so I’m not asking them to step forward, I wouldn’t ask them to step forward. I don’t want them to take repercussions.

NBC Entertainment chief Bob Greenblatt opened his Television Critics Assn. exec session by talking up the Peacock’s “year of improvement” and unveiling four high-profile longform projects in the works.

Greenblatt said the Peacock is working on a miniseries about Hillary Clinton to star Diane Lane; a reboot of “Rosemary’s Baby”; a new version of Stephen King’s “Tommyknockers”; and a historical project with Mark Burnett about the pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock.

Contrary to popular belief, Republicans don’t hate budget deficits. On the contrary, they love them. When they occur on the Democrats’ watch, they provide Republicans with endless talking points on how they are bankrupting the country and will inevitably lead to high inflation and interest rates. This is good for Republicans, politically, because rich people, the elderly and other core elements of the Republican coalition get scared and give lots of money to Republican candidates.

In office, of course, Republicans care nothing about the deficit. They cut taxes willy-nilly, sharply raise defense spending and start wars if necessary to justify it, create huge numbers of pork barrel projects, and enact massive new entitlement programs such as Medicare Part D, all while asserting that they are the party of fiscal responsibility.

When a Democratic administration such as that of Bill Clinton comes along that actually is fiscally responsible, Republicans change the subject and talk about something else. As at least some of us remember, Clinton inherited a budget deficit of 4.7 percent of the gross domestic product from the George H.W. Bush administration in 1992. By the year 2000, Clinton had turned that deficit into a budget surplus of 2.4 percent of GDP.

I don’t recall a single Republican ever congratulating Clinton for his amazing fiscal achievement. All I remember are the pathetic attempts by Republicans to take credit for something they had absolutely nothing to do with. Every single Republican in Congress voted against the 1993 budget deal, which raised taxes, imposed severe caps on spending, and laid the foundation of the surpluses.

During the 2000 campaign, Republican George W. Bush ran against the budget surplus. He said it was dangerous because Congress might spend it. As Bush’s principal budget adviser, Hoover Institution economist John Cogan, put it during the campaign, “Anyone familiar with history has to be dubious about Congress’s ability to keep its mitts off the surplus and put it to debt reduction.”

This was a ludicrous argument because Bush could have simply vetoed any effort to spend the surplus. The argument became even more ludicrous when Bush brought in Republican control of the House and Senate with his election. The only way the surplus could be spent is if Republicans allowed it.

After talking office, Bush shifted the argument away from the danger of the surplus being spent to the idea that it represented unnecessary taxation. As he told a joint session of Congress on February 27, 2001, “You see, the growing surplus exists because taxes are too high and government is charging more than it needs. The people of America have been overcharged, and on their behalf, I am here asking for a refund.”

As we know, Republicans quickly enacted a large tax cut, including a gimmicky tax rebate that even Bush’s own economic advisers told him was economically worthless. And it was; subsequent research showed that it had no stimulative effect whatsoever. So they did another rebate in 2008 that was also a failure.

Despite Republican promises of faster economic growth, the economy languished, requiring—you guessed it—more tax cuts. There were 7 major tax cuts during Bush’s presidency that collectively reduced revenues by 2.3 percent of GDP; that is, they increased the budget deficit by 2.3 percent of GDP.

Republicans simply ignore the effects of tax cuts on the deficit; they just pretend that they have no effect or use magical thinking to assert that revenues didn’t actually go down. But in fact, federal revenues fell from 20.6 percent of GDP in 2000 to 17.6 percent of GDP by 2008. There is no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts did anything except reduce revenues and increase the deficit dollar-for-dollar.

And because the Bush tax cuts continued well after he left office, they were responsible for much of the deficits that Republicans have blamed 100 percent on the Democrats since noon on January 20, 2009. The Republican-sponsored Medicare Part D program will add about one percent of GDP to spending forever and Republican wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost at least $1 trillion thus far, with as much more that will need to be spent for decades on veterans’ benefits.

For reasons unknown to me, Democrats have always seemed reluctant to take credit for the budget surpluses under Clinton or to call out Republicans for their hypocrisy and endless lies about the cause of the deficits and utter disingenuousness about dealing with the problem seriously. They routinely torpedo any deficit reduction plan with so much as a penny of higher taxes and always include huge tax cuts for the rich in their own budget plans.

Don Lemon is a waste of black skin and lip gloss. Fuck him. You don’t do stuff like this. You don’t EVER sit there and side with a virulent racist like Bill O’reilly. What he said has NOTHING to do with Trayvon and it has nothing to do with the Trayvon and his family not getting the justice they deserve.

Due to the protests and renewed resolve to challenge racial profiling and refuse to carry the responsibility for other people’s racism and paranoia, there’s a backlash market/appetite for reactionary “they bring it on themselves” content. Don Lemon has signaled once and for all, when the going gets tough, he will kick the black community for ratings. Nothing more complex than that. CNN wants some of those Fox viewers and this sort of race-baiting and anti-black propaganda brings them to the yard.

SCOTIA, N.Y. — Supporters of a head-shop owner vindicated on drug charges are now demanding a second look at old cases involving a bad informant.

Donald Andrews, Jr.’s attorney, Kevin Luisbrand, showed the in-store surveillance video taken from the Dapp City Smoke Shop in Scotia last March that shows the informant planting drugs.

Luisbrand said it proves that an unnamed police informant set up Andrews by planting crack cocaine in his Scotia shop.

It was only after Andrews requested the Grand Jury watch the surveillance video that investigators realized they had a bad informant. The video shows the informant event takes a cell phone picture of the drugs, which was used as “proof” of a drug by detectives who were waiting outside.

The felony charges we’re dropped, but Andrews supporters are now demanding that seven old cases involving the same informant get a second look.

“Racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse, because people will feel as if they’ve got to compete with some other group to get scraps from a shrinking pot,” Mr. Obama said. “If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested. Everybody feels as if we’re rolling in the same direction.”

————————–

Miranda

As we all know, poor white folks have always been duped and told it was “others” that were keeping them from arriving. Every bit of history in this country points to the utter stupidity and ignorance by poor white folks who would do every bit of bidding for wealthy robber barons in the hopes that maybe some day they too could be rich enough to never get their hands dirty. They will relish in their exploitation as long as they can believe they are better than darkies.

The problem has always been working class White people. Pew poll just last week pointed out that the President’s rating s have only slipped with non-college educated Whites. College educated Whites are supporting POTUS. These are the same idiots that don’t want to see that they are not working because the GOP won’t pass the Jobs Bill. They are so fucking ignorant that when it’s proven in a couple of years that Obamacare is working in places like CA,NY, MD, while other places will not be working because they GOP would rather see them DIE than get proper healthcare- they still won’t get it.

You know how I feel about them since they want to cling to that Whiteness-FUCK. EM

PORTLAND, Ore. — A federal jury in Oregon has awarded $18.6 million to a woman who spent two years unsuccessfully trying to get Equifax Information Services to fix major mistakes on her credit report.

Julie Miller of Marion County was awarded $18.4 million in punitive damages and $180,000 in compensatory damages, though Friday’s award against one of the nation’s major credit bureaus is likely to be appealed, The Oregonian reported.

“And if Congress thinks that what I’ve done is inappropriate or wrong in some fashion, they’re free to make that case. But there’s not an action that I take that you don’t have some folks in Congress who say that I’m usurping my authority. Some of those folks think I usurp my authority by having the gall to win the presidency. And I don’t think that’s a secret. But ultimately, I’m not concerned about their opinions — very few of them, by the way, are lawyers, much less constitutional lawyers.”

CNN anchor Don Lemon is getting a flurry of reactions on Twitter for his remarks in support ofFox News host Bill O’Reilly‘s repetitive demonization of black people, but perhaps none more tersely devastating than that of MSNBC contributor Goldie Taylor, who is more through with Lemon than a Country Time taster with a citrus allergy. While Lemon has retweeted some positive reactions, and a very negative reaction from a CNN guest, there’s little sympathy to be found in a Twitter search for Don Lemon right now.

Here’s what MSNBC’s Goldie Taylor had to say:

“Just saw Fruitvale Station. Heard Lemon remarks. There is nothing I can say. Yet.
I just have to wonder. Exactly which America does he live in?
But if I had a dollar for every turn coat mofo who made it up and out, then cut the rope ladder behind him…
…they get to thinking that good money, good suits and good manners will make them see you differently…I’ll tell you what though. If you step to the plate, your behind better be ready to take a pitch…”

Italy’s first black minister has a banana thrown at her during party rally speech

Italy’s first black minister has condemned a spectator who threw bananas towards her while she was making a speech at a party rally.

Integration minister Cecile Kyenge, who was born in Democratic Republic of Congo, has angered far-right groups with her campaign to make it easier for immigrants to gain Italian citizenship.

She has been a target of racist slurs since her appointment in April.
Insulted: Cecile Kyenge, 48, who was born in Democratic Republic of Congo and moved to Italy when she was 18, said Dolores Valandro’s words were an ‘insult to all Italians’

Integration minister Cecile Kyenge has angered far-right groups with her campaign to make it easier for immigrants to gain Italian citizenship

Black Girls Rock!

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Potus Takes Oath of Office

Flotus & Daughters at Great Wall of China

My Brothers Keeper

AFRO PUFFS

Most Adorable Shoe Stealer

Six Little Babies

Fatherhood

Even though 3Chics Politico is written and curated by three women: Ametia, Rikyrah, and SouthernGirl2, I must nominate this as one of the most engaging blogs I've found. Devoted to politics and culture, these three shine a light on contemporary life with humor and spirit.